


and it goes like this (i can't live without you)

by TheNightbloodSolution



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, F/M, Introspection, clarke introspects about her relationship with bellamy throughout the seasons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:47:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22761919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheNightbloodSolution/pseuds/TheNightbloodSolution
Summary: Could she? Of course, she could. The question has never been could she. The question is, and always has been: Will she?---Clarke has always known Bellamy loved her. She’s just never thought she was good enough for it.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 7
Kudos: 88





	and it goes like this (i can't live without you)

**Author's Note:**

> canon compliant but like... octavia didn't get sucked into the anomaly because i love ignoring that part of the s6 finale.

Clarke has always known Bellamy loved her.

Okay, maybe not _always_ , those days at the Dropship were rough.

But ever since she came home from Mount Weather, her face covered in cuts and bruises and finally clean but still feeling like there was dirt she should claw at caked on it, and he had wrapped his arms firmly around her torso, clutching her tight enough she felt her lungs constrict in the best way, she had known. Bellamy Blake loved her.

And how could he not, when she loved him too? Had she not just run with a force that physics shouldn’t possibly allow from a girl of her small stature and clung to him like a lifeline? Of course she loved him. Of course he loved her. _Of course_.

She hasn’t always known in what way. Those days in Camp Jaha when the sun past overhead and long hours burned against their skin as they plotted to free their friends from the Mountain, she thought he might be quite fraternal. He doted on her as he did Octavia, pressing her to finish her rations at mealtime and bumping his shoulder against hers as they sat on logs by the campfire.

He sometimes would leave extra blankets in her tent that he’d found lying about and claimed no one needed. She deserved them, he said, for what she’d gone through in the Mountain. She deserved them more than anyone in the camp, and she needed them, too, because she was so small, she’d simply freeze if she didn’t have them. (She didn’t always keep the blankets, she felt bad having more than the rest and would sometimes distribute them to the younger kids that had made it down in the Ark. Still, she always thanked him for the gifts, and he’d always shrug noncommittally and say it was nothing.) (It wasn’t nothing. It was never nothing.)

The first time she suspects it may be something other than brotherly love is when she sees him again in the Mountain. A guard uniform clings to his body foreignly, the same way her grounder coat sits on her shoulders. Just a bit off. His eyes swim with desperation, with the knowledge that both of them have been left alone, but there is also something else in his eyes as he grips her gaze over his sister’s shoulder: relief.

But it can’t be love, not in that way. Not when she sent him in here. The minute she told him to go, that it was worth the risk, was the minute she thought _she_ could love him that way. A love with coy smiles and stolen kisses in the nighttime inside of dark tents. But she could never have that, because before she knew it he was gone, inside a Mountain that was a deathtrap, a Mountain she had sent him to. He couldn’t possibly love her when she had lied to him, told him his sister was nowhere near a bomb she had later let drop. To save him, sure, but he didn’t know that. Nor would he care. Bellamy would gladly die for his sister, and instead Clarke watched a city burn to save him, risking a life he cared about more than his own in the process. So, the relief in his eyes had nothing to do with her. It was Octavia, clearly, relief that she was safe.

Still, that was harder to believe that by the day’s end, when he asked her to come in for a drink, as if they hadn’t just irradiated an entire population. As if they could sit and talk, catch up like they were old friends after a long reunion. It was harder to believe he didn’t love her that way when she saw his eyes, the depths of brown swimming first in confusion when she confessed her plan to leave and then in pure distress as he begged her to stay. She thought, for a moment, that he might tell her he loved her. Declare it right then and there and use it as leverage to keep her in camp.

He doesn’t, of course. And he’s right not to. She doesn’t deserve to be loved by a boy as loving as him. His heart is too big for his broad chest, too big for the entire Mountain they just destroyed, even. She sees the way he loves his sister, if he loved her like that… she would never earn that kind of love. A boy like him loved. A girl like her destroyed.

That doesn’t stop her from wondering, though, in the dark nights in her cave with berries staining her hair. Wondering if it would be different had he confessed something to her; love, romance, anything. Would she have stayed?

She doesn’t think she would have. A girl who ends civilizations doesn’t deserve a comfortable bed and cotton sheets, or warm meals with a boy who tucks the stray hair behind her ear and looks at her like she’s the one who keeps the clouds hanging in the sky. Bellamy deserves a girl with a heart as big as his, who can love just as hard as he can.

He finds it, too, in a girl with dark brown eyes that shine like stars; a girl whose smile holds joyful secrets. Not that Clarke knows that, of course. All Clarke knows is that for the first time in three months, she sees Bellamy in front of her, and she thinks she couldn’t have been more wrong about her romantic notions. She notes the stern set of his jaw, the black in his stare.

When he asks her to come home, it isn’t what it was when he begged her to stay months ago. He isn’t pleading with her, he isn’t asking. He’s giving her a last chance.

_She should come home to hers_.

And she could. She could leave right now, see his brown eyes soften in relief. Hold his hand and squeeze it in reassurance as they exited this dreadful tower. She could say she’s sorry, just once, and he’d let her come home with no qualms. He would give her that. He would give her anything, if she only asked.

But home would mean her mother and Kane doting, checking if she was okay after all that time. Even their small glimpses at Polis had almost been too much. They would poke and prod, checking her status until she was forced to admit she wasn’t fine at all. She would crumble. With nothing to fight for, nothing to save, she would crumble into a million pieces. She could see herself crying in a soft bed, and almost feel Bellamy’s arm around her stomach as he pulled her close and held her as she fell apart. She can’t let herself fall apart.

So, she rationalizes. She’s needed here, in Polis. There has to be an ambassador, and who knows the grounders better than her? She’s been one for three months. And Lexa, who she’d just bowed to, biting back bile in her mouth, was not to be trusted. If Clarke wasn’t there to enforce her word, who would?

He doesn’t beg her to come with. He just leaves. She’s used up her last chance.

Clarke thinks she loved Finn, and then she’s sure she didn’t. She told him she loved him. But could that be right when she knows Lexa? If this isn’t love, what is it? It’s drama and politics and passion and _death_. It is tragic, so it must be love.

Clarke is a flamekeeper, now, her hands finding cool plastic in times of solace. She traces the small infinity with her pinky when she has the time. Lexa would be in there forever, not dead, not dead, not dead. Infinity.

The thing about last chances is that they’re final. Three strikes, you’re out. The player isn’t allowed back in the game. But the way Bellamy wraps her hand up with tender eyes makes her think she doesn’t know the rules of this game. She’s the one who flipped a table and screamed at a possessed girl, she should seem absolutely crazy. He shouldn’t want anything to do with her, the crazy girl who holds a chip like it’s her heart and the girl who burned her every bridge.

He’s not even close to fine; she can feel it coming off him in waves. He’s drowning in a sea of regret, just like she is, but he wraps up her wounds and calms her heart. He smiles when she doesn’t deserve it. She smiles back, and she knows he is the only one who would be able to pull it out of her.

Then, he goes to sit with a girl possessed, who taunts him about his past and the girl he lost and the girl he loves. Clarke is left alone, with a pinky tracing infinity and short, shallow breaths.

It is easier to love a chip than to love a man. She can’t lose what she already lost. So, she decides she’ll have nothing to lose at all.

As she holds the Flame while they travel along the coast, she knows she is selfish. She has made her decision, where she’ll put her love, but she can’t let him go. She pulls him back in with words that ring true in her heart, that she needs him and he needs her. If she were a better person, she’d leave him to his tears on that beach, to deal with the sorrow on his own. Instead, she is his shoulder to cry on, she lets him clutch her like a lifeline. With his face buried in her neck, she can’t spare a thought to the tech in her pocket. She can only think about the man in her arms.

When her own mother almost kills her, he saves her. When she can’t find the strength, he grabs her hand. When she pulls the lever, she thinks of him. (Who knows how to overcome pain better than him?) When it’s all over, he holds her. She hopes he’ll never let go. Facing a dying world seems like too daunting a task, even for them.

He does let her go, of course, and when he does, she runs like its what she was born to do. She bolts towards danger in every direction. Toward warring grounders with swords and long-lost bunkers. Toward impossible plans and burning homes. No matter how far she runs, no matter how fast, he follows.

She sleeps her nights away next to a grounder girl and it feels like the safe choice. He doesn’t chase her in sleep, only in dreams.

She doesn’t realize the little compromises she makes for him. She puts him on the list because he’s a born leader who deserves it. She trades 50 spots in Arkadia because he would do the same for her. Hell, he’d give up all the spots if the roles were reversed, and she knows it.

She doesn’t realize until he’s staring down the barrel of her gun, saying it has to be a kill shot. Because the person outside of the bunker is the only one on Earth he’d pick over Clarke. It feels vain to think, but Clarke knows it’s true. She knows how he looks at her, how his hand finds the small of her back when they stand side by side. She knows what it feels like when he squeezes her waist in reassurance. She knows he loves her in a way she can’t even begin to comprehend. She knows she feels the same.

She knows she can’t pull the trigger, even to save the human race. He is worth more than all of humanity to her.

He almost told her, once. When he was fretting about a lost sister and they were parting ways. _If I don’t see you again-_ She knew how the sentence ended, and she wouldn’t let it be.

_If anything happens to me-_

Maybe they’re more alike than she ever realized.

She watches the rocket fly away with her friends and the man she loves. Into the sky she came from. She’s never been happier, even enveloped in burning death. If he lives, that’s all she needs.

When the dust settles, and the rubble, and she scrapes by on her own until she finally finds her little patch of green and her beautiful, wonderful little Nightblood, she starts to wonder if it happened the way it should.

She was never meant to leave the Earth, that much she knows, staring down at Madi fast asleep. She was meant to be here for this girl, to figure out how they’d live through this together. But would it have been better if she had been able to finish her sentence? Or for him to finish his?

No, she decides. Things played out just right. She hopes her radio messages are getting through to him, even if he never responds, but the odds are low. Comms were broken when the rocket took off. If he doesn’t know she’s alive, she wouldn’t want him to know how she feels. That she loves him with a force she can’t even grasp, that he’s been her lifeline since she landed on the ground, that she barely knows how to function without him around, that she’s had to relearn everything she ever knew about Earth now that he’s gone. It would be too much, knowing all that and thinking she was gone. She’d never do that to him.

She knows, because on the darkest nights in Shallow Valley, when Madi is asleep in the rover and Clarke stares up at the stars where she prays her friends are, she’s sometimes sure they didn’t make it. The odds were so low, Raven said it herself. She spelled out every way takeoff could go wrong. Maybe they ran out of oxygen. Maybe they couldn’t get the algae farm running. Maybe they never even reached the Ring.

When she thinks likes this, she’s glad she never let Bellamy finish his sentence. It’s hard to love a dead man. It’s easier to think he never loved her that way at all.

Five years past. Then six. Madi is almost as tall as she is. Clarke has never known love like she has for Madi. She used to think that it was easier to hide her love in a chip than to love a living, breathing person, but she’s sure now she was wrong. The risk is worth it when the love is this deep. She would turn the entire Earth for her child.

Something dead inside her awakens six years and seven days after Praimfaya, when she thinks she sees him. What was just an ember in her soul ignites into a fire, into _hope_ , only to be doused with water just as quickly.

He is not there to save her this time. She has to protect herself and Madi. She has to do it on her own. Still, she takes parts of him with her without even thinking about it. She holds the gun how he taught her and leaves Madi under the floor, putting her life before Clarke’s own without even thinking. She is more Bellamy than she has ever been, and she doesn’t even realize it.

The shock-collar seems to hit her on a never-ending cycle. She answers truthfully to everything, and still gets zapped over and over. Her vision is going black, everything is swirling, and she thinks before she completely goes under, the last thing she’ll see will be Madi, because there is nothing in the world that means more to her. It’s not surprising, though, that she gets Bellamy instead, the only other vision her head might conjure. The man who has had her heart in a death grip for longer than she’s known, who could squeeze it and she’d crumble, not that he ever would. The deep timbre of his voice rattles her to her core, even as she edges away from consciousness. He feels so real. _She is_ …

She isn’t alone. He’s here. He’s home. _She’s_ home in his arms.

They laugh with Raven and Murphy, even though they both still have tears in their eyes. They make dark jokes about sandstorms and tyrants, because it’s easier than addressing what his sister has become. It feels nice, to have adult company. To joke in a way she can’t around Madi. But she thinks if Raven was here, or Monty, or Murphy, she wouldn’t feel the fluttering in her chest that she does when he tells her she impressed him and he looks at her like _that_ across the fire.

It’s weird that a heart can feel the fullest it’s ever felt while it simultaneously gets ripped in two. She feels the size of her own heart grow as she cradles Madi’s face, then feels the enlarged being in her chest split straight down the middle when Bellamy runs into Echo’s waiting embrace.

She’s happy for him. This is what she’s always wanted, for him to be happy with a girl who deserved his love. He’s finally gotten what she hoped he’d have. She’s never been gladder that they didn’t admit anything before their separation. When she sees the way he looks at Echo, not sparing a glance toward her now that his space family is here, she thinks maybe he never had anything to admit to her at all.

Broken hearts shouldn’t be able to break. There should be a rip, and it should be done. The heart is ripped in two. But Clarke supposes it must be the law of multiples. It rips to two first. Then to four when Madi shakes Octavia’s hand. Eight when Bellamy leaves her chained up. Sixteen when she leaves him behind. Maybe every time a heart rips, it gets a little easier to tear. She wonders what happens when the heart shards become so small they disappear.

But maybe hearts aren’t glass, but fabric, which can be mended. Heart pieces can be sewed back together with a little patience and love. Clarke happens to know a boy raised by a seamstress, and he’s better at sewing hearts than anyone Clarke’s ever met. Or maybe just her heart, she doesn’t know. She feels stitches pulling threads back together when he smiles at her and invites her to the bridge, or when he whispers to her when he wakes up. The needle works faster as they cry together, looking down at a new planet of hope and grieving two loved ones. Her heart is tearing and mending at the same time.

He defends her when no one else will. Lets her back in when Murphy and Shaw scoff at her attempts to honor Monty’s legacy. She doesn’t blame them. How can a Commander of Death preach peace?

Deep down, she thinks Bellamy should be much the same, jumping on their bandwagon of quips about her selfishness. He has the most to use against her, and she deserves none of what he gives her. She doesn’t deserve his smiles, nor his laugh, nor his embrace, when Sanctum lets them in, and she begs his forgiveness. She doesn’t _deserve_ to be his family, and yet she is, she knows she is. He loves her, and it may not be the way she longed for when the Earth ended and she spent nights alone on a patch of green thinking about what his lips might taste like, but it _is_ love. And it’s not the love he gave her before he left, either, it’s different. _But it’s love._ She’ll take what she can get.

It’s odd not to think about Bellamy for a night. To swing around in a pretty dress in a stranger’s arms and not think about him. (Well, maybe she does think about him, in the passing sense that she’d love it if he swung her around the dancefloor too, but she’s having fun all the same.) Letting her guard down is not an easy task for Clarke, but she does it, so that she might succeed in preserving Monty’s legacy. In doing better.

It’s not odd at all that this backfires, and she ends up cold and alone, paralyzed on a table. She can’t move but she still feels goosebumps on her arms. She thinks she’d shiver if she could. It’s not odd that she thinks of Madi, as Simone urges her husband to do what they need to in order to get their daughter back. It’s not odd that she sees Bellamy’s smile in her mind when Russell’s syringe plunges towards her neck. It’s not odd he’s her last thought. It’s not odd at all.

He covers her ‘mindscape,’ as Josephine terms it. The other blonde says Clarke has too many pictures, that it’s cluttered, but Clarke thinks it’s organized chaos. She traces his different forms along the wall. Him in his guard uniform at Mount Weather, him at the Dropship, him when he finally came back to her. So many different versions of the same man.

None of those versions are what she finds when Josephine reveals the deal Bellamy made. She expects him to be fighting, the passion that she knows lives in him. And she can see the passion in his eyes, but doesn’t hear it in his words. He is dull and relenting. He will not avenge her. She’s glad; this is the right choice, the choice Monty would have made, but…

He is her family. Did she ever make it back into his? Maybe it doesn’t matter either way. He will save their people. He will take care of Madi, she knows it. It doesn’t matter where she ended this game in his heart, whether he let her back in. Her fight is finally over.

Or so she thinks.

_GET UP AND FIGHT!_

The walls boom with Bellamy’s voice. The ground shakes and vibrates as his cries for her penetrate through the mindscape. With the throw of an ax, another thing Bellamy taught her on the ground, Josephine explodes. Clarke goes back to where she belongs.

Air fills her lungs and the first thing she sees is not far from what she imagined as she died. Bellamy, hair a mess and eyes watery. He pulls her in before she has her breath back, one of those lung-constricting hugs he’s so good at. She barely has any air as it is, but she thinks it’s okay not to breathe, if she has him here.

He won’t let her go. Not when it’s the best thing to save their people, not when it’s the only way to try for peace, he clings to her calloused hand. She can’t believe she ever doubted him. He brought her back to life, left his friends behind for her.

Dying might have helped her, in a weird way. For the first time in a long time, her heart feels whole. Not haphazardly sewn back together, but one beating entity, no cracks in sight. Her heart has restarted.

They can do better together.

_We did do better. I have to believe that matters_.

It does, she thinks, as the suns set and her tears dry on her cheeks. Her mother is gone, another crack in her newly whole heart. Bellamy runs his hands through her hair, whispers affirmations to her, and she’s not sure exactly what he’s saying or if it means anything in particular, but it means everything. Each word is a stitch, mending her as they sit and stare at the setting suns.

Their friends are all over the place. Jackson and Miller are drinking to a victory. Raven, Emori, and Echo are looking for a way to build their own radiation shield, so they can all finally leave Sanctum. Octavia is comforting Jordan and telling him that things will get better.

And Bellamy is with Clarke, saying nothing and everything at all. He’s a man who could choose to be anywhere on the planet, and he’s sitting with her, lips pressed against her head, murmuring.

Could she let him love her? Of course, she could. The question has never been could she. The question is, and always has been: Will she?

Leaning back into him, feeling his arms wrap tighter around her, she thinks, finally, she will.

**Author's Note:**

> the heart metaphor got out of hand and i don't know whose fault it is but i refuse to take the blame for it


End file.
